cloud, technology and trends

Azure IaaS Server Network Performance

I am back from a week at Microsoft Ignite. This was my first time going, and I’m coming back with a dizzying amount of new information and a suitcase full of swag. I can’t pass the swag along but will do my best with the information.

One item that stood out was from the session I attended on Azure IaaS Server Network Performance. Microsoft Azure Networking now offers up to 30 Gbps depending on the server size. In order for VM’s to take advantage of this higher performance, they need to have Receive Side Scaling (RSS) enable on the NIC. Enabling RSS allows the network adapter to use multiple CPU’s instead of just core 0. This has an obvious advantage for network throughput but should be enabled carefully on servers with a CPU intensive workload. RSS is disabled on Windows VM’s by default and can be enabled with this command: